What was going on outside? Neil had been crouched inside a thrift store, struggling to get his backpack's zipper around a spare set of jeans he'd picked up, when he'd heard a roar. Just as he'd been making his towards the rear exit, he heard what was unmistakeably gunfire, and froze.
Monsters didn't know how to use guns.
Well, at least not the ones he'd encountered.
It was a huge risk, but he had to investigate. He'd spent more than a week looking for other survivors, and had just given up and set his sights on getting out of the city; it figured that once he stopped looking, that was when someone else showed up. A look outside the store's window confirmed it: A man and a woman and a monster. Of course, the two humans had to be on the other side of the street. Wonderful.
Neil slowly crept out of the store, thankful the door had gone missing before he'd come around, and moved just enough that the woman could see him. At close range, there was a possibility he could deal with the monster, owing to a recent discovery about himself; but the woman was obviously armed, and he was really only useful in close range. No sense in being a liability and fouling her aim.
The thing was advancing on the other two, so he needed to act quick. He ran to a car and put both palms flat on the hood, thumping it with a blast from his hands and--by some stroke of luck--set off the car alarm.